I wrote a talk entitled How Humans See Data that puts several of these ideas, among others, into a coherent framework based on research by Bill Cleveland.
One of the best moments in car talk was when Astronaut John Grunsfeld called in to complain about how his government vehicle, a 'Rockewell van kind of thing' was running. Ray and Tom finally caught on when Grunsfeld admitted he was going 17K MPH while a couple hundred miles north of Hawaii. ;)
The banter between them included memories of an unpaid bill and references to the 'small technical institute' nearby ("Oh, that place!").
The movie Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is absolutely hilarious. I've rewatched it several times, and I originally went into it never having heard of Alan Partridge and only barely of Steve Coogan. The trailers don't capture it all. "Trust me, Susan." is probably the greatest line ever in the midst of a shootout.
I was properly introduced to Steve Coogan and also Rob Bryden through their movie The Trip.
We’re creating a new global average standard of living with disastrous consequences.
The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.
The wealthy areas, already unable to offer many citizens the ability to raise a family, are desperately engaging in extreme financialization, ludicrous political distractions, and “make work” shell games just to present an increasingly unconvincing veneer that society is still functioning and fully worthy of participation.
Western civilization is the metaphorical Biblical statue from Daniel: After spending decades replacing the support structures with ever cheaper materials, we’re now finally in the “feet of iron and clay” stage, and it’s likely AI will complete the metaphor by representing the boulder that smashes into the weakened base and topples the entire statue.
I realize this all sounds hilariously alarmist, but I have yet to see a positive spin on the impact of AI that isn’t ultimately the same old decoupled Pete Peterson style nonsense of “it’s gud because worker productivity number goes up”: as if we don’t already have two generations of human beings that grew up in an age of massively increased productivity yet cannot afford a family nor a home to put them in - a state of existence that even some medieval serfs would pity.
My weirdly accelerationist hope is that AI advances quickly enough (and management stays short-sighted enough) to cause a meaningful political coalition to form between the already-marginalized blue collar workers and the newly disrupted paper-pusher/cubicle class.
The cracked.com podcast, specifically the episodes with Jason Pargin were God-tier.
I can't see a world in which I would re-listen to the archive, but they were foundational to so much of my thinking. And to this day I follow Pargin on whatever podcast episode he goes on, and on any subject, knowing it'll be incredible.
If you somehow haven't heard, the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Podcast has him as a regular guest: https://sifpod.podbean.com/
Each of these are by former Cracked employees, so when Jason Pargin is on, the conversation gravitates to a lot of the same big subjects - society, art, culture, science, and all the ways in which we take it for granted, or don't understand nearly the way we should.
I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.
Wyler makes inclinometers that are accurate enough to measure the change in angle of a surface plate directly. It's amazing technology. Here is a YouTube video from 2011 that talks about how they were developed. I remember that I was watching videos about surface plate calibration, and this came up.
??? Are we talking about a physical cube? I don't think you can have multiple identical permutations; each of the 26 external pieces of a 3x3x3 cube is unique. You would have to somehow have more than one way to get, say, a Yellow-Blue-Red corner, or a White-Green edge for this to be true, no?
People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track.
This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out:
Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.
Agree so much with this. Frank Howarth, Abom79, This Old Tony, Welding Tips and Tricks, Jimmy DiResta, Stumpy Nubs, Stefan Gotteswinter - there's so much great content like this on youtube. TV was never a great place for craft because it has to serve a general audience. Youtube has so much niche specific content with pretty great production values.
>Yes, this post is about our own “claimers” in complexity theory.
>The TV Claimers meet a grisly end. We will not say any more about it. We want to be nice.
>Please: Do not stop reading. Yes we know that it is likely that no claimer really has such a proof.
I understand the author's frustration on the subject, but I don't think his disdain is warranted. This reminds me of the time Mehdi Sadaghdar, who runs the YouTube channel ElectroBOOM, disagreed with former MIT Professor Dr. Walter Lewin's proposal that Kirchhoff's Law is "for the birds".
Sadaghdar reproduced the results from Dr. Lewin's experiments, but proposed an alternative explanation about what could be happening. He created a video for Dr. Lewin, and stated that he was open to being proven wrong, ending that "either way, the science will win".
Dr. Lewin's response, instead of educational, was belittling where he generalized Sadaghdar as one of the group that holds to Kirchhoff's Law "religiously", and that he needs better education. The explanation was wrapped around in copious amounts of disdain. Sadaghdar eventually realized that they both fundamentally believed the same thing, and that their disagreement was only an error in communication, however, Dr. Lewin's videos are far more disliked than liked, and he didn't come out appearing to be the good guy from the exchange.
My point is, maybe generalizing the people you're criticizing, even though you "think the vast majority of claimers of P=NP or other big results have almost always worked alone" and comparing them to a group of people who die a "grisly" death in a fictional TV series, before you begin a lecture, isn't educational.
I want apples that I can fit three in my mouth at a time, that squish like grapes. I want apples bigger than my head, that I can pop into the oven whole, then cut off the top and spoon out the flesh like custard. I want apples that crunch when I bite them. I want apples that splat when I throw them. I want apples that taste like cherries. I want apples that taste like pears. I want apples that taste like different kinds of apple when you bite opposite sides of the fruit. I want apples that stay the same color when you cut them up. I want apples that are already fermenting by the time you get them home. I want apples that shrivel up all winter into little wrinkly apple-raisins, and then still taste fine in spring.
What I don't want is one apple that's one size fits all. Because the last variety they tried for that was Red Delicious, and it is the worst named variety of apple I have ever eaten. The only way to get worse is to try naturally pollinated grown-from-seed apples, and even then you have to be very unlucky with your pick.
Apple farmers tend to graft the variety clones onto dwarfing rootstock, to control for height and branching, so it's likely that any mutual crop would work just as well for any kind of apple. I seem to recall that someone was trying to get truffle to grow in apple orchards, but I don't remember seeing anything about it actually being successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePEwr-VxqXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKGhmt7jgMg